CHRISTIAN ABUSE

Mounties lay new charge against Oblate priest, Inuit delegates ask Pope to intervene

Mounties have laid a new charge against a Roman Catholic priest who has previously avoided trial for multiple allegations of sexual abuse linked to his time in Nunavut.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

RCMP said a Canada-wide arrest warrant has been issued for Johannes Rivoire, who is in his 90s and lives in Lyon, France.

"It's about time," Piita Irniq, an Inuit elder who has been fighting for more than a decade to have Rivoire returned to Canada, said Tuesday from Ottawa.

Nunavut RCMP said officers received a complaint last year regarding sexual assaults that occurred about 47 years ago. Mounties said Rivoire was charged last month with sexual assault on a female.

The latest development in the investigation of the Oblate priest comes after the leader of the national organization representing the Inuit asked Pope Francis to intervene in the case during a meeting at the Vatican on Monday.

Natan Obed, president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, said he asked the Pope to “speak with Father Rivoire directly and ask him to go to Canada to face the charges.” Obed also asked the Pope to request that France step in if Rivoire is not receptive.

In an email, Oblate leader Rev. Ken Thorson said he also spoke with Obed.

"I informed him that we would be encouraging Rivoire to do what he should have done long ago: co-operate with police and make himself available for the legal process, if not in Canada, then in France," wrote Thorson, with OMI Lacombe Canada based in Ottawa.

Thorson added the order has also written to Justice Minister David Lametti, offering its co-operation in any investigation.

"We have not received a request to share additional records in response to the recent arrest warrant, but will fully co-operate and provide any relevant information, when asked."

Rivoire was in Canada from the early 1960s to 1993, when he returned to France.

A warrant was issued for his arrest in 1998. He faced at least three charges of sexual abuse in the Nunavut communities of Arviat, Rankin Inlet and Naujaat. More than two decades later, the charges were stayed.

The Public Prosecution Service of Canada said at the time it was partly due to France's reluctance to extradite.

Inuit leaders and politicians from senators to Nunavut premiers have continued to urge that the priest face trial. Those calls have grown with the discovery of unmarked graves at the sites of former residential schools run by the Catholic Church.

Bishop William McGrattan, vice-president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, said Monday that “justice and truth are important in this path of reconciliation.” He said Pope Francis heard that bringing the priest to Canada to face justice is important.

“The church wants to work with the relevant justice authorities, whether they be international or Canadian," he said.

"And if there are allegations that someone has committed these abuses, that they need to be brought to justice and the church should not stand in their way but assist those who have been victims to seek justice and healing."

The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the order of which Rivoire was a member, has invited Obed for a meeting at its office in Rome on Thursday to discuss the case.

Irniq said there are at least six Inuit still living who allege Rivoire abused them. Word of the new charge is spreading quickly, he said.

"They're happy that things are moving along," he said. "There's been a lot of press and a lot of talk, so I think the people I've talked to are very hopeful.

"It feels more like justice."

Marius Tungilik was Irniq's childhood friend and comrade in the struggle for Inuit self-determination. Tungilik, who died in 2012, claimed he was abused by Rivoire and was among the first Inuit to speak out about what he had suffered at residential school.

Irniq said his long fight to have Rivoire extradited was fuelled by the desire to see justice for his old friend.

"I kind of made a promise to Marius that one day I would I do something to make this happen.

"Marius would say the same thing I did," Irniq said. "Finally. It's about time."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 29, 2022.

— With files from Bob Weber in Edmonton

Kelly Geraldine Malone, The Canadian Press

Louis Theroux heads to Los Angeles as the world of adult entertainment grapples with its own wave of #MeToo.

As the rise of platforms like OnlyFans give adult performers financial independence away from the studio model of old, Louis encounters a new generation using their online platforms to call out alleged predatory behaviour by prominent industry figures. As a result, an industry that prides itself on pushing sexual boundaries is asking itself difficult questions about consent, and infamous figures like long-time performer Ron Jeremy are being challenged in court.

Louis also meets those who are pushing back at what they see as 'trial by Twitter'. But their critics accuse them of representing porn’s ‘old guard’ – clinging on to a culture where young performers have been vulnerable to older men with control over their careers who are all too eager to turn a blind eye to unacceptable behaviour. 

Duration 59 mins

First shown 27 Feb 2022

Available for 10 months

BBC iPlayer - Louis Therouxs Forbidden America - Series 1: 3. Porns MeToo

California reparations to be limited to descendants of enslaved people, taskforce decides

Landmark group votes to base compensation plan on lineage rather than race after day of debate

Shirley Weber speaks at the Capitol in Sacramento, California, in 2020. Weber wrote the legislation creating the taskforce. Photograph: Rich Pedroncelli/AP

Guardian staff and agencies
Wed 30 Mar 2022 

California’s first-in-the-nation taskforce on reparations for African Americans has voted to direct state compensation to the descendants of enslaved and free Black people who were in the US in the 19th century.

The group said that a compensation and restitution plan based on lineage – as opposed to one based on race, which would have opened the possibility of reparations to a broader group – had the best change of surviving a legal challenge. They also said that Black immigrants who had chosen to migrate to the US in the 20th and 21st centuries did not share the trauma of people who had been kidnapped and enslaved.



‘If not us, then who?’: inside the landmark push for reparations for Black Californians

They also opened eligibility to free Black people who migrated to the country in the 19th century, given possible difficulties in documenting genealogy and the risk at the time of becoming enslaved.

The decision passed by a vote of 5-4 on Tuesday evening following a day of lively debate. Others on the committee had argued that reparations should include all Black people, regardless of lineage, who suffer from systemic racism in housing, education and employment. They also said it was difficult to prove lineage and that enslavers often shipped people to work in various plantations in and outside the country.

The two-year reparations taskforce was created in 2020, making California the only state to move ahead with a study and plan, with a mission to study the institution of slavery and its harms and to educate the public about its findings.

The committee is not even a year into its two-year process and there is no compensation plan on the table.

Longtime advocates have spoken of the need for multifaceted remedies for related yet separate harms, such as slavery, Jim Crow laws, mass incarceration and redevelopment that resulted in displacement of Black communities.

Compensation could include free college, assistance buying homes and launching businesses, and grants to churches and community organizations, advocates say.

Yet the eligibility question has dogged the taskforce since its inaugural meeting in June, when viewers called in pleading with the nine-member group to devise targeted proposals and cash payments to make whole the descendants of enslaved people in the US.

The committee’s work has been informed by numerous testimonies. Arthur Ward, a Chicago resident, called in to Tuesday’s virtual meeting, saying that he was a descendant of enslaved people and had family in California. He supported reparations based only on lineage and expressed frustration with the panel’s concerns over Black immigrants who experience systemic racism.

“When it comes to some sort of justice, some kind of recompense, we are supposed to step to the back of the line and allow Caribbeans and Africans to be prioritized,” Ward said. “Taking this long to decide something that should not even be a question in the first place is an insult.”

Kamilah Moore, the committee’s chair, favored eligibility based on lineage, rather than race, saying it would have the best chance of surviving a legal challenge in a conservative US Supreme Court.

Shirley Weber, the California secretary of state who authored the legislation creating the taskforce, had argued passionately in January for prioritizing descendants for generations of forced labor, broken family ties and police terrorism. The daughter of sharecroppers forced to flee Arkansas in the dead of night, she recalled how the legacy of slavery had broken her family and stunted their ability to dream of anything beyond survival.

Opening up compensation to modern Black immigrants or even descendants of enslaved people from other countries would leave US descendants with mere pennies, she said.

But taskforce members, nearly all of whom can trace their families back to enslaved ancestors, have struggled with a pivotal question that is bound to shape reparations deliberations across the country. The panel needed to make a decision so economists can begin calculations.

Critics say that California has no obligation to pay up given that the state did not practice slavery and did not enforce Jim Crow laws that segregated Black people from white people in the southern states.

But testimony provided to the committee shows California and local governments were complicit in stripping Black people of their wages and property, preventing them from building wealth to pass down to their children. Their homes were razed for redevelopment, and they were forced to live in predominantly minority neighborhoods and couldn’t get bank loans that would allow them to purchase property.

Today, Black residents are 5% of the state’s population but over-represented in jails, prisons and unhoused populations. And Black homeowners continue to face discrimination in the form of home appraisals that are significantly lower than they would be if the house were in a white neighborhood or the homeowners are white, according to testimony.

Nkechi Taifa, director of the Reparation Education Project, is among longtime advocates who are thrilled the discussion has gone mainstream. But she’s baffled by the idea of limiting reparations to people who can show lineage when ancestry is not easy to document and enslavers frequently moved people among plantations in the US, the Caribbean and South America.

“I guess I tend to be more inclusive rather than exclusive,” she said, “and maybe it’s a fear of limitation, that there’s not enough money to go around.”

A report is due by June with a reparations proposal due by July 2023 for the Legislature to consider turning into law.

Amazon union election: Will this former worker make history?

By Natalie Sherman,
 BBC, Business reporter, New York

Published

IMAGE SOURCE,GETTY IMAGES

Image caption,

Chris Smalls has led protests against Amazon around the country - including in front of Jeff Bezos properties

When former Amazon worker Chris Smalls organised a small protest outside a massive Amazon warehouse in New York two years ago, he didn't intend to pick a years-long fight with one of the world's largest companies. He just wanted his team to be able to do their jobs safely.

"When the pandemic came, employees underneath me were getting sick," he says. "I realised that something was wrong."

Amazon fired him, citing quarantine violations. But his concerns caught the world's attention - an early sign of a much bigger labour battle brewing at the e-commerce giant.

In the following months, as its business surged thanks to the pandemic, Amazon faced accusations around the world that it neglected staff welfare - claims it denied.

In the US, the company now faces its most serious labour unrest in decades.

After walkouts and protests across the country, workers at three warehouses in New York and Alabama are deciding whether to join a labour union - which would be a first for Amazon in the US.

Mr Smalls is one of the leaders in the fight.

• Gen Z fights for unions, one Starbucks at a time
• The battle to halt Amazon's new Africa headquarters
• A sleeping American giant now spoiling for a fight

He says he's embracing a role the shopping giant set out in a leaked memo from 2020, which described Mr Smalls as "not smart or articulate" and argued that if he became "the face of the entire union/organising movement" it would help to undermine it.

Mr Smalls, who worked at Amazon for more than four years, starting as an entry-level worker before getting promoted, said he was blindsided by the memo, which some saw as racist, though Amazon told reporters at the time the author wasn't aware Mr Smalls was black.

"My whole life changed in one minute," the father-of-two says. "From there, I started to pretty much try to make them eat their words."

IMAGE SOURCE,REUTERS

Image caption,

Chris Smalls at an early protest against Amazon in 2020

For 11 months, the 33-year-old and his team have staked out a spot opposite his former workplace, the JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island, intercepting staff on their way home to make the case that they need a union to fight for them in negotiations with the e-commerce giant.

His team are seeking higher pay, longer breaks, more paid time off and paid medical leave, among other changes. They want to convince workers that a union will be a more effective way to raise complaints over rules like one that requires staff to work unscheduled overtime shifts.

Voting on the question began 25 March and the result will be announced in coming days. Amazon faces a second election at a smaller warehouse in the same industrial park next month.

Organisers say the stakes are nothing short of the future of the American worker, pointing to Amazon's rank as the second largest employer in the US.

"We need to take down Amazon. We need these workers to organise," says Derrick Palmer, who helped Mr Smalls organise his 2020 protest and was also disciplined (but not fired) by Amazon, which cited social distancing violations. "We need them to know they have the power."

Revival of US unions?

Amazon saw off a similar unionisation effort in Alabama last year, convincing workers to vote 2-1 against the idea.

The vote - the first the company had faced in the US since it was founded in 1994 - looked decisive. But regulators later called for a re-run, saying Amazon had violated rules that protect the right to organise during the campaign.

Officials started counting the results of that vote on 28 March.

John Logan, professor of labour and employment studies at San Francisco State University, says it's remarkable that activists have even got to the point of an election, given how much American laws favour employers.

Last year, union membership in the US sank again, continuing a decades-long decline despite a surge of activism leading to successful campaigns at Starbucks, media outlets and some smaller retailers.

"Something has definitely changed in the last two years, when it comes to the labour landscape in the United States, and... the Amazon union votes are a reflection of that change," Prof Logan says.

"It would be a monumental event if either of the unions [in New York] were to win. But even if they were to lose, if the results are close I still think it will result in more union activity at Amazon warehouses across the country."

'Earth's best employer'?

Last year, in the aftermath of the Alabama election, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos pledged that the company would do better by its workers, including addressing the firm's high injury rate.

IMAGE SOURCE,GETTY IMAGES

Image caption,

Jeff Bezos told shareholders he wanted to make Amazon "earth's best employer"

"Despite what we've accomplished, it's clear to me that we need a better vision for our employees' success," he wrote in his final letter to shareholders before stepping down as chief executive.

Amazon - which US regulators have accused of retaliating illegally against labour organisers on their staff - remains staunchly anti-union.

The firm says it offers competitive pay and benefits and a union will only add a new layer of bureaucracy, while membership fees eat into workers' wages.

To fight the campaigns, the firm has inundated staff with texts, fliers and other materials and held repeated mandatory training meetings about the issue, where they cast doubt on the union's ability to secure improvements for its members.

"Our employees have the choice of whether or not to join a union," says spokeswoman Kelly Nantel. "As a company we don't think unions are the best answer for our employees. Our focus remains on working directly with our team to continue making Amazon a great place to work."

Amazon has been urging workers to vote, warning that if the election is dominated by pro-union forces and the union emerges victorious, it will represent everyone at the warehouses in question.

"Negotiations are always a give and take," an Amazon representative warns in audio of a meeting in New York supplied by organisers. "What's important to the [Amazon Labor Union] may not be important to you. They will be willing to trade your priorities for one of theirs."

A union victory in New York is far from assured.

IMAGE SOURCE,REUTERS

Image caption,

Officials will start counting the vote of the re-run election in Bessemer, Alabama on 28 March

Leroy Hairston, 22, who has worked at the JFK8 warehouse in New York for about two months - not unusual at a place with high turnover - tells the BBC he is leaning against the union. He thinks it is inexperienced and would struggle to make changes, making resolving staff issues more complicated,

"I don't see the point," he says. "Everything is prolonged instead of just going to HR."

Mr Smalls says he is hopeful that New York - where one in five workers belong to a union - offers better conditions for victory than Alabama, a notoriously anti-union state.

He also has contacts in more than a dozen other warehouses around the country that he hopes to unionise should he prove victorious.

"Once we get established here, we want to spread like wildfire," Mr Smalls says.

Over the last month, Amazon Labor Union volunteers have made a concerted final push to convince undecided workers.

Julian Mitchell-Israel, a 22-year-old community activist who took a job with Amazon to join the union effort, estimates their odds of winning at just over 50%.

Image caption,

Chris Smalls leads a rally outside Amazon

At a blustery cold rally in the Staten Island industrial park this month, Mr Smalls, in a red hoodie and trainers, seemed undaunted. Surrounded by workers, union activists and politicians he led the small crowd in a chant of: "We will win! We will win!"

Mickie Garson, 50, who has worked at Amazon for three years and drove in on her day off to hear the union make its pitch, surveyed the scene from the Amazon parking lot, divided from the speakers by several lanes of traffic.

She said she remained "on the fence" despite experience at previous jobs that made her confident a unionised workplace would be better.

"It's the pressure of knowing that we could make history," she says. "We're excited with the fact that it could happen but also, then what happens after that?"

More on this story

• A sleeping American giant now spoiling for a fight

  7 days ago

  

• Gen Z fights for unions, one Starbucks at a time

  17 September 2021

  

• The battle to halt Amazon's new Africa headquarters

  14 September 2021

Joe Biden signs anti-lynching bill in historic first

BBC

US President Joe Biden has signed legislation that designates lynching as a federal hate crime.

The law follows more than 100 years and 200 failed attempts by US lawmakers to pass anti-lynching legislation.

The Emmett Till Antilynching Act is named for the black teenager whose brutal murder in Mississippi in 1955 helped spark the civil rights movement.

Perpetrators of a lynching - death or injury resulting from a hate crime - will face up to 30 years in jail.

Mr Biden said: "Thank you for never giving up, never ever giving up.

"Lynching was pure terror to enforce the lie that not everyone, not everyone, belongs in America, not everyone is created equal."

He added: "Racial hate isn't an old problem - it's a persistent problem. Hate never goes away. It only hides."

US shuts Emmett Till investigation without charges

The bill was passed unanimously in the Senate earlier this month. The House had voted overwhelmingly in support of the legislation last month. Three Republicans voted no: Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Chip Roy of Texas and Andrew Clyde of Georgia. They argued that it was already a hate crime to lynch people in the US.

Lynching is murder by a mob with no due process or rule of law. Across the US, thousands of people, mainly African Americans, were lynched by white mobs, often by hanging or torture, in the 19th and 20th Centuries.

Some 4,400 African Americans were lynched between 1877 and 1950, according to the Equal Justice Initiative. Those who participated in lynchings were often celebrated and acted with impunity.


Her ancestors enslaved mine. Now we're friends

"Lynching is a longstanding and uniquely American weapon of racial terror that has for decades been used to maintain the white hierarchy," the bill's sponsor, Illinois Congressman Bobby Rush, said ahead of its passage.

In 2020, following the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, the House passed an earlier iteration of the bill, but it was blocked in the Senate.

Many racial justice advocates have described the death of Floyd, as well as the murder of Ahmaud Arbery - who was hunted down and shot by three white men in Georgia in 2020 - as modern-day lynchings.



What took so long?
By Chelsea Bailey, BBC News

One would be forgiven for thinking that lynching was already a hate crime in the United States. After all, it's been decades since Billie Holiday's haunting ballad, Strange Fruit, told of "black bodies swingin' in the Southern breeze", and mobs of white Americans no longer line up to take commemorative photos beneath hanging trees.

But that's exactly why the Emmett Till Antilynching Act is so significant. Lynchings may not look the same way they did in the past, but that doesn't mean they don't happen.

Many regard the murders of black Americans James Byrd Jr, Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd as modern-day lynchings.

The bill signed into law on Tuesday bears the name of a black teenager whose mother held an open-casket funeral to force the world to see the gruesome effect of racial violence in the US.

For many, the fact that it took Congress more than 65 years to pass the legislation would seem to speak volumes about America's tacit stance on the subject.

The first anti-lynching bill was introduced in 1900, by George Henry White, the only black man then serving in Congress. The bill failed and continued to fail for more than 120 years.

Lynching is not unique to America, but its use for racial terror and suppression is. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, more than 4,300 black Americans were lynched between the post-Civil War Reconstruction period and 1950. And those are just the murders that were documented.

Confronting America's gruesome past continues to be a subject of contention. Sometimes, it can take more than a century.

US President Joe Biden signs historic anti-lynching legislation

President Joe Biden has at last made lynchings in the United States a federal hate crime after more than a hundred years of delays.

US President Joe Biden enters the Rose Garden to sign into law the Emmett Till Anti-lynching Act

US President Joe Biden has signed into law the first federal legislation that makes racist lynching a hate crime, putting an end to over a century of delays in outlawing what he called "pure terror."

The Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act is named after a 14-year-old Black boy whose brutal murder in the southern state of Mississippi galvanized the US civil rights movement in the 1950s.

Biden signed the bill — which was passed by the Senate earlier this month — on Tuesday at a desk in the White House Rose Garden.

He was surrounded by Vice President Kamala Harris, members of Congress, top Justice Department officials, a descendant of Ida B. Wells, a Black journalist who reported on lynchings, and Rev. Wheeler Parker, a cousin of Till.

"Lynching was pure terror, to enforce the lie that not everyone, not everyone belongs in America, not everyone is created equal,'' the president said.

Those convicted under the law will face up to 30 years in jail.

The bill , which passed the Senate by unanimous consent and the House of Representatives by a vote of 422-3, ends a history of impunity over what researchers say were thousands of lynching between the the end of the Civil War in 1865 and 1950 — that often went unpunished.

Who was Emmett Till?

Till was visiting relatives in Mississippi where he was abducted and killed in August 1955.

A white woman had alleged that the boy had propositioned her in a store and touched her on the arm, hand and waist.

Days later, Till's mutilated body was found in a local river.

The boy's grieving mother had insisted on an open casket to show the world how her son had been brutalized.

The murder became a turning point in the civil rights era.

Two white men, Roy Bryant, Carolyn Bryant's husband, and J W Milam, his half-brother, were charged with murder but were subsequently acquitted by an all-white jury.

The men later admitted in an interview that they had murdered Till.

'Lynching not a relic of the past'

On Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris said that with the signing of the bill, the president was addressing both "unfinished business" and "horror" in America's history.

Harris, the nation's first Black and Asian American vice president, co-sponsored the bill while serving as a US senator from California.

"Lynching is not a relic of the past. Racial acts of terror still occur in our nation. And when they do, we must all have the courage to name them and hold the perpetrators to account," Harris said.

Biden also emphasized that forms of racial terror continue in the US, underlining a need for an anti-lynching statute.

"Racial hate isn't an old problem, it's a persistent problem,'' Biden said.

"Hate never goes away. It only hides.''

dvv/kb (AFP, AP Reuters)